The only reported case of scoring a solid 2 on the Henderson Scale of Plot Derailment. Its long, so be prepared for a read. And no, it was not me. Direct Copy and Paste, Strong language ahead kiddos.
Meet the Party
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This is a story that I'm not proud of where I lose my temper and utterly wreck a game, but I think it's a share-worthy story nontheless.
First time with this specific Pathfinder group, I found an ad for them somewhere which I won't reveal for the sake of their privacy. I went there because I figured it'd be a fun experience since almost all the games I'd played for like five years had been online in some way rather than in-person. I brought a couple boxes of cheap pizza with me as my contribution to the snack table and we get down to business.
The GM: A big grizzly bear of a man. I'm a pretty tall guy, and he made me feel short. He was nice enough and fairly good humored, but he was a tad gruff and hamfisted in some of this tactics for "coaxing" players through things. I'm probably being critical though all things considered... His game was basically Pathfinder with 3.5's Epic level progression rules and a lot of 3.5 fluff. He also had a neat houserule about permenancy applying to any spell/psionic effect for a standardized ammount of gold for the spell's level, although they could be dispelled or disrupted as usual. I cringed when I heard that the story proper was going to be riddled with psionics, which I am far from a fan of, but I thought I'd grit my teeth and bear with it despite my prejudice against them. The plot was basically that Magic was slowly falling out of use as more and more people spontaneously developed psionic powers, and the rest is the plot of the X-men movies. I think that the GM didn't want to allow players to use psionics... but to be honest, I couldn't really tell because that went out the window way before the session even began. We were level 20, supposedly the best of the best, and were supposedly going to be facing epic-level challenges.
Nancy No-Chin: A scrawny little guy with what appeared to be a missing chin. He was quiet and out of the way, and he never really did much OOCly, so I can't comment too much on his real character. He played a Monk/Psionic Fist/Soul Fist variant who was basically the stereotypical zen, master-of-self, I-only-want-peace-but-will-kill-you guy of the party. The character was so bland, I don't even remember anything else about him.
Fish Face: She wasn't ugly, but she was bug-eyed and looked like she had silicone injections in her lips. Okay, she was pretty ugly, but she had the typical skinny bitch attitude like she was hot stuff. So, I couldn't help but superimpose a big carp over her every time I looked at her. It's probably for the best, because I was too distracted by this mental image to really pay attention to a lot of the stupid shit she said. she was at most times trying to drag politics or religion into debate where it was nonsequitor or a red herring altogether. Her character was an annoying as shit Wilder who was the typical "fiery tempered" Mary Sue. She geared up to be the nuke of the party. Also, it was a fucking Drow with trite, WASP ethics. Yeeeaaah...
The Only Decent Player (not me): A really big guy and not at all fun to look at, but he was mostly pleasant and seemed to know his stuff. He wanted to play a bard, but the GM convinced him to play something else through the same means he convinced me to not be a UMD focused rogue (minmax or gtfo), and he ended up going for a Magus. It was kind of interesting because he played him like a tribal warrior-shaman whose tribe was in deep shit because of the developments in the more developed parts of the world and was attempting to save his people from being disturbed by the recent events. He was also really creative in combat. All in all, I think he was the only one who put real effort into the game.
That Faggot: This guy gives a bad name to faggots everywhere. He had no concept of personal space and no concept of "I'm not gay." Thankfully, he did have a concept of "If you touch me there again, I'm going to pummel you and file a sexual misconduct suit." I suppose I'd be flattered if it was a woman, but god damn, this guy was a fucking creeper. It didn't help that his character was what I called OOCly "The Date Rape Psion." Seriously, That Faggot would probably turn people homophobic if they'd never met a normal gay guy before.
Me: I was making a high charisma, Trap making/disabling and UMD focused rogue, but I was flat out told, in so many words, that I needed to make a minmaxed, powergamey character or I wasn't going to get to play. I took offence, so I made a Wizard, stereotypical in dress from the conical hat to the robes and tiny glasses. I wanted to give him a beard, but apparently in his setting, elves can't have facial hair, so I said his eyebrows grew down to his belt. It was an old fossil of an elf from back when magic was the milk and honey of the world and was going to recruit anyone he saw with even a modicrum of magical talent in an ill-advised attempt to save the practice of magic in a world of pervasive psionics by showing up on random people's doorsteps, telling their children that they were wizards, and spiriting them a way to a permanent greater demiplane with a castle where his cohort would teach them magic. If you get the joke, you're smarter than most of this group. Most of my feats were item creation ones so that I could have the wands and staves that I loved to have in my arsenal.
First time with this specific Pathfinder group, I found an ad for them somewhere which I won't reveal for the sake of their privacy. I went there because I figured it'd be a fun experience since almost all the games I'd played for like five years had been online in some way rather than in-person. I brought a couple boxes of cheap pizza with me as my contribution to the snack table and we get down to business.
The GM: A big grizzly bear of a man. I'm a pretty tall guy, and he made me feel short. He was nice enough and fairly good humored, but he was a tad gruff and hamfisted in some of this tactics for "coaxing" players through things. I'm probably being critical though all things considered... His game was basically Pathfinder with 3.5's Epic level progression rules and a lot of 3.5 fluff. He also had a neat houserule about permenancy applying to any spell/psionic effect for a standardized ammount of gold for the spell's level, although they could be dispelled or disrupted as usual. I cringed when I heard that the story proper was going to be riddled with psionics, which I am far from a fan of, but I thought I'd grit my teeth and bear with it despite my prejudice against them. The plot was basically that Magic was slowly falling out of use as more and more people spontaneously developed psionic powers, and the rest is the plot of the X-men movies. I think that the GM didn't want to allow players to use psionics... but to be honest, I couldn't really tell because that went out the window way before the session even began. We were level 20, supposedly the best of the best, and were supposedly going to be facing epic-level challenges.
Nancy No-Chin: A scrawny little guy with what appeared to be a missing chin. He was quiet and out of the way, and he never really did much OOCly, so I can't comment too much on his real character. He played a Monk/Psionic Fist/Soul Fist variant who was basically the stereotypical zen, master-of-self, I-only-want-peace-but-will-kill-you guy of the party. The character was so bland, I don't even remember anything else about him.
Fish Face: She wasn't ugly, but she was bug-eyed and looked like she had silicone injections in her lips. Okay, she was pretty ugly, but she had the typical skinny bitch attitude like she was hot stuff. So, I couldn't help but superimpose a big carp over her every time I looked at her. It's probably for the best, because I was too distracted by this mental image to really pay attention to a lot of the stupid shit she said. she was at most times trying to drag politics or religion into debate where it was nonsequitor or a red herring altogether. Her character was an annoying as shit Wilder who was the typical "fiery tempered" Mary Sue. She geared up to be the nuke of the party. Also, it was a fucking Drow with trite, WASP ethics. Yeeeaaah...
The Only Decent Player (not me): A really big guy and not at all fun to look at, but he was mostly pleasant and seemed to know his stuff. He wanted to play a bard, but the GM convinced him to play something else through the same means he convinced me to not be a UMD focused rogue (minmax or gtfo), and he ended up going for a Magus. It was kind of interesting because he played him like a tribal warrior-shaman whose tribe was in deep shit because of the developments in the more developed parts of the world and was attempting to save his people from being disturbed by the recent events. He was also really creative in combat. All in all, I think he was the only one who put real effort into the game.
That Faggot: This guy gives a bad name to faggots everywhere. He had no concept of personal space and no concept of "I'm not gay." Thankfully, he did have a concept of "If you touch me there again, I'm going to pummel you and file a sexual misconduct suit." I suppose I'd be flattered if it was a woman, but god damn, this guy was a fucking creeper. It didn't help that his character was what I called OOCly "The Date Rape Psion." Seriously, That Faggot would probably turn people homophobic if they'd never met a normal gay guy before.
Me: I was making a high charisma, Trap making/disabling and UMD focused rogue, but I was flat out told, in so many words, that I needed to make a minmaxed, powergamey character or I wasn't going to get to play. I took offence, so I made a Wizard, stereotypical in dress from the conical hat to the robes and tiny glasses. I wanted to give him a beard, but apparently in his setting, elves can't have facial hair, so I said his eyebrows grew down to his belt. It was an old fossil of an elf from back when magic was the milk and honey of the world and was going to recruit anyone he saw with even a modicrum of magical talent in an ill-advised attempt to save the practice of magic in a world of pervasive psionics by showing up on random people's doorsteps, telling their children that they were wizards, and spiriting them a way to a permanent greater demiplane with a castle where his cohort would teach them magic. If you get the joke, you're smarter than most of this group. Most of my feats were item creation ones so that I could have the wands and staves that I loved to have in my arsenal.
Party Strife Just a Few Minutes In
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It wasn't a good start. I was already being an asshat because I got sand in my cunt over being told to minmax or gtfo, and Fish-face and That Faggot were annoying as fuck too, which was adding to my ire.
We finally start the session. We congeal off the walls of a high-end tavern in some urban area. some plot, and then we go wandering about, I spellcraft and detect magic every apprentice-aged kid I see and try to discretely determine if they have any talent. The GM blocks this at every turn for understandable reasons; I mean, it would derail things. Yet, at the same time the Date Rape Psion was dragging NPCs off all the time and attempting to describe all the terrible things he was doing to them. I told him to knock it off more than the GM did, and the GM sent me a few warning glances about it, but seriously, I don't need to hear about the Date Rape Psion unleashing all his fetishes on villagers. The Date Rape Psion also harassed my character ICly, but I slapped a Protection from Evil on myself and he couldn't physically touch me for a while. I ended up making it permanent later because I knew the little fucker was counting down for the spell to expire so he could get on with touching my wizard inappropriately. Thankfully I packed a lot of diamond dust with me for some of my more powerful magic and so I could see what I could do with the GM's very generous permanency house rules.
The "Fiery Tempered" Wilder Sue gave my character flak, calling him a pedophile ICly with great vindication as if it was the scummiest act imaginable, which was funny coming from a Drow. Granted, I suppose some of his stuff with scouting students could appear a bit like that, but dear, sweet Jesus, why target me and not the Psion who was sneaking off to rape NPCs whenever we were pausing to investigate something? The Wilder continued to lambast me for reasons I didn't really understand, with which I retaliated with a long winded pontificating ramble about how magic was dying and why it needed to be passed on. This had a lot of old-man rambling stereotypes about the good ol' days with lots of Patridge Farms references and I ate up a lot of time with that. Although, I did stop to occasionally note that my character was indeed going about his business and proceeding towards the obvious goal of the current plot point.
It was about a minute into my good ol' days spiel before she started to talk over me with this weird line of dialogue. It was like she was projecting her hate for an ex onto my wizard and DARVO-ing the fuck out of him, which got confusing fast, so I used Message cantrip to talk in her ear about the good ol' days and leave the general area so my wizard would be out of earshot. Yeah, I know message establishes a two-way conversation, but I argued that because magic was so obscure now, like someone being fluent in Esperanto in Asia, that she wouldn't know how without a spellcraft or knowledge arcana check of some kind. Fortunately, she didn't have either trained and I got to be petty and talk about the good ol' days without having to listen to her ICly or- thanks to the GM- OOCly either. I only kept it up for a couple minutes and went back to the plot right aftewards.
We finally start the session. We congeal off the walls of a high-end tavern in some urban area. some plot, and then we go wandering about, I spellcraft and detect magic every apprentice-aged kid I see and try to discretely determine if they have any talent. The GM blocks this at every turn for understandable reasons; I mean, it would derail things. Yet, at the same time the Date Rape Psion was dragging NPCs off all the time and attempting to describe all the terrible things he was doing to them. I told him to knock it off more than the GM did, and the GM sent me a few warning glances about it, but seriously, I don't need to hear about the Date Rape Psion unleashing all his fetishes on villagers. The Date Rape Psion also harassed my character ICly, but I slapped a Protection from Evil on myself and he couldn't physically touch me for a while. I ended up making it permanent later because I knew the little fucker was counting down for the spell to expire so he could get on with touching my wizard inappropriately. Thankfully I packed a lot of diamond dust with me for some of my more powerful magic and so I could see what I could do with the GM's very generous permanency house rules.
The "Fiery Tempered" Wilder Sue gave my character flak, calling him a pedophile ICly with great vindication as if it was the scummiest act imaginable, which was funny coming from a Drow. Granted, I suppose some of his stuff with scouting students could appear a bit like that, but dear, sweet Jesus, why target me and not the Psion who was sneaking off to rape NPCs whenever we were pausing to investigate something? The Wilder continued to lambast me for reasons I didn't really understand, with which I retaliated with a long winded pontificating ramble about how magic was dying and why it needed to be passed on. This had a lot of old-man rambling stereotypes about the good ol' days with lots of Patridge Farms references and I ate up a lot of time with that. Although, I did stop to occasionally note that my character was indeed going about his business and proceeding towards the obvious goal of the current plot point.
It was about a minute into my good ol' days spiel before she started to talk over me with this weird line of dialogue. It was like she was projecting her hate for an ex onto my wizard and DARVO-ing the fuck out of him, which got confusing fast, so I used Message cantrip to talk in her ear about the good ol' days and leave the general area so my wizard would be out of earshot. Yeah, I know message establishes a two-way conversation, but I argued that because magic was so obscure now, like someone being fluent in Esperanto in Asia, that she wouldn't know how without a spellcraft or knowledge arcana check of some kind. Fortunately, she didn't have either trained and I got to be petty and talk about the good ol' days without having to listen to her ICly or- thanks to the GM- OOCly either. I only kept it up for a couple minutes and went back to the plot right aftewards.
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The Wilder tried to PK me about ten minutes later when I rejoined the group after a brief detour. Apparently she was incensed at the fact that I found a cheap way to make it so that I didn't have to listen to her but could prattle on like the old man my character was. Luckily, I hadn't been flatfooted, having good sight of her, and won the initiativen. So, I beat her stupidly high spell resistance and turned her into a newt, because my wizard was all about the classics. One mage hand later, and I held her newtified character in my hand and decided that I'd talk about about why the Newt Baleful Polymorph was such a classic. The Date Rape Psion and the Monk Psion both decided to defend her character and demanded that I release her at once. Not wanting everything to devolve into fighting, I played it off as if my Wizard thought that they wanted her released into their custody and told them that they looked like they could "handle any of the kid's hissy fits." He handed her over and began to walk off, "forgetting" to undo the effect. They cleared their throats and got his attention about it, and I told them that they could hire a court mage to dispell it and they reminded me that mages were almost extinct. Oh! I then dispelled the baleful polymorph and went "silly me" and moved on. I think they were all pretty upset save the Magus who was being all sage and witch-doctor like in the background of all this and trying to keep the peace like a good guy.
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Fish-Face, No-Chin, and That Faggot were clearly plotting since they'd take breaks to go off and huddle and were passing notes during the session in what they probably thought was a discreet manner. Maybe it's my trained eye for catching students texting, but they were really obvious about it. I figured they were going to gang up on me at some point, so I just kept a scroll of plane shift in one hand in case I had to escape, figuring being a wizard would let me excuse just happening to have a scroll ready. Fortunately, whatever was going to happen was put off when what was apparently the BBEG showed up to cause havoc and monologue at us. We were told that his "awe inspiring feats of psionic power" were terrifying even to the likes of us blah blah blah, we're obviously not supposed to fight him because he's too powerful. I would later find out that he was some level 40 psion/some psionic prestige class. Apparently he was trying to turn psions against non-psions blahblahblah, okay, he's a psion-supremicist not!Magneto.
Fish-Face tries to get my wizard killed by the BBEG by attacking him and rolling bluff to make it look like it was me before cheesing it. No-chin and That Faggot soon follow. The Good Guy Landwhale stays for like a round before he gets out of there too after my wizard assuring him that he'd be fine and to go. I was only really worried about losing my gear since I had a cloning lab set up in my Demiplane and would just appear there with a couple negative levels and no items, not that the others knew that. Those dicks just wanted my character to die. The BBEG looks at me and asks who dared to attack him. I played the part of a senile old man picking up his scrolls and looking through them while failing to make a coherent statement. While doing this, I ask the GM for a planes check so that what I'm about to do isn't metagaming. My obscenely high planes roll let me know, in the GM's Words "Everything about the Plane of Force" which was the specific plane that I wanted to know about. I manage to get out a read magic in the meantime which the GM is nice enough to not make me roll init for, and I activate a scroll of Time Stop that I had retrieved in the confused old man act. I get lucky on the roll and I've got five rounds to do whatever in. So what do I do? I cast planar adaptation on myself, pull out a scroll of gate, and slide on over to a specific point in the Plane of force, the point that psions the biggest psionic connection is.
Fish-Face tries to get my wizard killed by the BBEG by attacking him and rolling bluff to make it look like it was me before cheesing it. No-chin and That Faggot soon follow. The Good Guy Landwhale stays for like a round before he gets out of there too after my wizard assuring him that he'd be fine and to go. I was only really worried about losing my gear since I had a cloning lab set up in my Demiplane and would just appear there with a couple negative levels and no items, not that the others knew that. Those dicks just wanted my character to die. The BBEG looks at me and asks who dared to attack him. I played the part of a senile old man picking up his scrolls and looking through them while failing to make a coherent statement. While doing this, I ask the GM for a planes check so that what I'm about to do isn't metagaming. My obscenely high planes roll let me know, in the GM's Words "Everything about the Plane of Force" which was the specific plane that I wanted to know about. I manage to get out a read magic in the meantime which the GM is nice enough to not make me roll init for, and I activate a scroll of Time Stop that I had retrieved in the confused old man act. I get lucky on the roll and I've got five rounds to do whatever in. So what do I do? I cast planar adaptation on myself, pull out a scroll of gate, and slide on over to a specific point in the Plane of force, the point that psions the biggest psionic connection is.
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Because of the various books that the GM had informed me that he had been using, I knew on a meta level that Psions are all connected to the plane of force. If you do it right, you can go on an easter scavenger hunt and sever a psion's ties to the plane which is a lot like forcefully making a cleric or paladin lose the favor of their god, all those abilities go bye-bye. Since the GM was so kind as to tell me that I knew everything about the plane of force, I thought I'd go and ruin the BBEG's day. Now, I only had three rounds left in my time stop, and I didn't really want to risk the BBEG figuring out what happened and being trapped with a level 40 psion on the plane of force, wizard or not. So, I got busy and cast gate, a gate to the point where the place between the negative energy plane and the quasielemental plane of void. I then take advantage of the GM's oh so generous permenancy house rules and dump 25k gold worth of diamond dust- out of about a hundred thousand that I had on my person- on making that gate permenant. Not wanting to be there when the chaos from that started up, I renewed my time stop and plane shifted to the material world and watched the unfolding chaos.
Thanks to my second casting of Time Stop, I had another two rounds to do as I will, so I cast an extended black tentacles and greater invisibility on myself. After that, I just spammed maximized empowered enervates from a staff until the fucker died. with psionics fizzling out of existence, he was a level 40 commoner. Thankfully, there are no saving throws versus enervation, so he died quickly and the GM had no plot because psionics didn't exist anymore, the plane of force was gone. The BBEG was dead and there were no more Psions anywhere. I then told the GM that my next step was to expand my attempts to teach magic so as to fill in the void created by missing Psions.
Thanks to my second casting of Time Stop, I had another two rounds to do as I will, so I cast an extended black tentacles and greater invisibility on myself. After that, I just spammed maximized empowered enervates from a staff until the fucker died. with psionics fizzling out of existence, he was a level 40 commoner. Thankfully, there are no saving throws versus enervation, so he died quickly and the GM had no plot because psionics didn't exist anymore, the plane of force was gone. The BBEG was dead and there were no more Psions anywhere. I then told the GM that my next step was to expand my attempts to teach magic so as to fill in the void created by missing Psions.
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WHAT? No, that can't be! The party can't win a few hours into the first session and take away all the plot. Retcon time.
The GM changes it back to before I started casting enervates and then he got dramatic about the earth shaking from the wild things being thrown out willy nilly by every psion in the material plane, and I managed to cast psionic resistance on myself, a spell that the GM had made available as an analogue to spell resistance since psions were everywhere, and that helped me avoid some nasty stuff that was being tossed in my direction. Every Psion was apparently discharging every power point they had at random. Because I used plane shift to get back to the material realm. The BBEG apparently still had his psionics under full control, and so I was confronted with a monologue of doom with psionic chaos being thrown around in the midst of it for drama. I pull out another scroll of time stop (because I had an asston of the things because why not?) and then I cast planar adaptation on myself and immediately left for one of many private demiplanes I had without waiting for him to finish. The BBEG followed me through what I assumed was GM fiat. So I cop out and get a scroll of Greater Demiplane out of my handy haversack, a scroll because I don't have six hours to actually cast the spell, so I can add a new property to the demiplane we were standing in. I chose "nonpsionic."
The GM changes it back to before I started casting enervates and then he got dramatic about the earth shaking from the wild things being thrown out willy nilly by every psion in the material plane, and I managed to cast psionic resistance on myself, a spell that the GM had made available as an analogue to spell resistance since psions were everywhere, and that helped me avoid some nasty stuff that was being tossed in my direction. Every Psion was apparently discharging every power point they had at random. Because I used plane shift to get back to the material realm. The BBEG apparently still had his psionics under full control, and so I was confronted with a monologue of doom with psionic chaos being thrown around in the midst of it for drama. I pull out another scroll of time stop (because I had an asston of the things because why not?) and then I cast planar adaptation on myself and immediately left for one of many private demiplanes I had without waiting for him to finish. The BBEG followed me through what I assumed was GM fiat. So I cop out and get a scroll of Greater Demiplane out of my handy haversack, a scroll because I don't have six hours to actually cast the spell, so I can add a new property to the demiplane we were standing in. I chose "nonpsionic."
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The GM stared at me blankly. I said that one of the many things you can do to a demiplane is make it so that there's no magic in it. Since he provided so many magical things that could affect psionics like psionic resistance, detect psionics, and other things for the sake of the setting and left it open to other things, I said that it was only logical that I could do it with a demiplane. He changed the rules again, says that the psions' connection to the plane of force is inherently different from magic and makes it so that a demiplane couldn't block it out... even though there's such a thing as an anti-psionics field, but whatever. I personally think it was the GM not wanting his terrible BBEG to turn into a level 40 commoner again, but that's just my opinion. Since the GM vetoed letting me negate psionics. In this plane, I had a bunch of constructs of mine crafting shit because you can totally do that if you give them a brain. Expensive, but awesome. This demipane had the fire dominant elemental trait, so my constructs that healed with fire damage healed obscene amounts of hp per round and already had a buttload of temphp on top of their normal max because this is where they lived, so I cast dimensional anchor on the BBEG and used my control over the constructs to just have them drop what they were doing and mob him.
After that, it was just a casting of greater invisibility, an antidetection spell, and spamming maximized empowered enervations until the BBEG was dead again.
After that, it was just a casting of greater invisibility, an antidetection spell, and spamming maximized empowered enervations until the BBEG was dead again.
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At this point, I was just told "you're out" and got thrown out of the host's house. The GM didn't even bother to Rocks Fall me; he just told me I was out. No matter how many retcons the GM used, he couldn't think of a way to salvage his plot without writing me out of the game.
And that, is how I got kicked out of a pathfinder group first session.
And that, is how I got kicked out of a pathfinder group first session.
. My buddy does a lot of D&D, I never got into it, but he talked about all that fun crap. I was like dude what game are you playing to do all that fun stuff and then he mentioned that and I was just like....oh...I don't do that myself, but alright man awesome! Be cool if they made a game with that much freedom.
